Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Putting these in writing in a single place for ease of reference. Unfortunately, no one wrote down all these predictions some years ago to show they really were predictions, but one could probably find textual evidence for many of these in various papers and blogposts. Some of them have been supported already, and some are…
Continue ReadingThere are many studies that look at signs for selection using large genomic datasets. This post provides a selective summary of such studies from 2018 to now, so very recent progress. There are in general two ways to approach the question of selection. First, one can look at known variants for traits found via GWASs,…
Continue ReadingMany people seem to have this impression. These arguments go back more than 10 years. This post quotes various UK newspaper articles going back to 2006: Underperformance of Poor White British Boys. Racial Reality. June 2, 2010 John Fuerst is probably the first hereditarian to seriously grapple with these issues: Partially falsified. Unwelcome Discovery. February…
Continue ReadingI am finishing up a large study on smart fraction theory (intellectual classes model). To this end, I reviewed all the empirical papers on the topic, and some historical ones. To save others and future-Emil the trouble of finding all these papers, here’s my collection. These are mainly collected by Google Scholar and following citing…
Continue ReadingSee prior post on national IQs and who you can’t cite. Economists and intelligence researchers don’t generally talk: Test scores, on the other hand, offer direct measures of a variety of more-or-less specific abilities and, when the tests in question are well-constructed, objective, standardized tests, they are fairly precise measures that can be kept quite…
Continue ReadingDer er is a famous meta-analysis showing that motivation affects IQ scores to a substantial degree: Duckworth, A. L., Quinn, P. D., Lynam, D. R., Loeber, R., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (2011). Role of test motivation in intelligence testing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(19), 7716-7720. Intelligence tests are widely assumed to measure maximal…
Continue ReadingSee also this post by greyenlightenment. There is a widespread (e.g. 1, 2, 3) but false belief that the 1970s supreme court case Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971) resulted in a de facto ban on using IQ (intelligence) or other cognitive testing in employment relations. This is not the case. Here’s…
Continue ReadingA lot of national intelligence criticism focuses on the measurement validity. Are the scores really comparable across countries? Most of the criticism is armchair stuff, or vaguer claims based on smaller studies such as this one: Multiple examples from different societies demonstrating that https://t.co/drJKXid5W0 — Will (@Evolving_Moloch) August 21, 2020 However, there are proper statistical…
Continue ReadingSome people think that human differences are just a matter of throwing enough money at the problem. Naturally, then, they always advocate for more educational spending whenever inconvenient gaps are such, such as those between kids of rich and poor kids: Hanushek, E. A., Peterson, P. E., Talpey, L. M., & Woessmann, L. (2020). Long-Run…
Continue ReadingBack in 2018, Scott Alexander published a troll post: Fight Me, Psychologists: Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong. From casual observation of people in rationalist community, and other any coffee salon demographics group, one can notice that there are a preponderance of first born. Some of this is due to confounding with fertility:…
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